


Come Home Broken

by reconditarmonia



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-01-26 14:10:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21375406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/pseuds/reconditarmonia
Summary: Emily's home is in the Dust District.
Relationships: Emily Kaldwin/Billie Lurk | Meagan Foster
Comments: 8
Kudos: 23
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2019





	Come Home Broken

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Stonestrewn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stonestrewn/gifts).

> Title from "Silver and Dust," the song the musicians play in the Crone's Hand. Happy Femslash Ex!

When Emily crawls through the window, pushing the broken boards aside and hearing the old wood snap, and unfolds herself in the room where her father grew up, she's overwhelmed by the sudden feeling: _I belong here_. She's never seen the place until this moment, but the low plaster ceiling and the flaking whitewash on the bricks feel like home for someone like her.

She sleeps there that night, deciding to put up with the hard floor rather than take her chances with the plants and other unidentifiable growths on the mattresses. All day she's been dodging Howlers and Overseers, ducking into window recesses and pressing herself against walls and rooftops to avoid the dust storms as best she can, and she sleeps like the dead, without even a whisper from the Outsider. Meagan knows the dangers of the Dust District better than she does; she won't worry, surely, if Emily doesn't return tonight. 

The palisades of Stilton Manor seem to loom, the next morning, almost as tall as Dunwall Tower itself, and a rough night's sleep hasn't cleared her mind with regard to Jindosh's mysterious lock at all. Callista would probably chide her for not being able to solve it. Meagan — Meagan trusts her to handle the situation however she thinks best, but she clasped Emily’s hand with her warm, callused one and told her “Be careful,” and it was a long moment before either of them let go. 

When she spends a few hours that day trailing Overseers to eavesdrop on their plans against the Howlers, she tells herself it's to get in Paolo's good graces — to be able to, eventually, stride through the front door of the Crone's Hand and demand everything he knows about how to enter the manor. And when she frees a couple of heretics, sneaking up behind the Overseers like nothing more than a shadow on the wall and wrapping a dusty arm around their throats, that's the right thing to do, even though they turn out not to know anything that can help her. She's better at this than she ever was at sitting through meetings and managing squabbling nobles; here, she doesn't feel like she's some sort of painted actor on a stage, wearing a costume and reciting a part.

The morning after that, she burns the mattresses in her father's apartment, and the furniture that's smashed beyond repair. She throws open the windows, crooked as they are, to let out the stale air, and starts to shovel out dust into the alley below. For a few coins, a kid agrees to take a message down to the place in the sewers where Sokolov dropped her off, in case he or Meagan can be found.

_Dear Meagan: I haven't yet figured out how to get into Stilton Manor. I'll come back when I've found out what happened there that night three years ago._

She hesitates a moment before signing her name. Meagan will know who it's from no matter what, and it could be an unnecessary risk — but she feels an odd ache, somewhere at the back of her throat, at the open end of the letter, the idea of leaving Meagan hanging without even a signoff. There are thousands of Emilys in the Empire.

_I'm sorry._

_Emily_

When she starts to run low on coin, she hires herself out as a bloodfly exterminator. It's her first time earning a living. The work isn't hard for someone with her powers, not like the work of the miners, whom she sees trudging back at night and lining up for soup and bread, in lines they've stood in for much longer than the two months Delilah's been on the throne. Still, she comes away with bleeding welts and burns, and as she salves and binds them alone in the little apartment, where she's scrubbed the floors clean and thrown down a mattress from a home more recently abandoned than this one, she wishes Meagan were here. Her touch wouldn't be gentle, but it’d be kind, even if Meagan wouldn't think of herself that way. Emily didn't realize that she would miss her.

She knows she's fooling herself in thinking that Meagan would ever want her to be doing this, even though, in some way, she's living the way Meagan would want her to live. Still, the thought comes to her that she's helping the people here more than she ever did on the throne. 

By the time she hears about Meagan tearing the district apart to find her, she's working as muscle for Paolo. He’s seen to it that families, mothers with children or aged parents, can move into buildings she’s cleared of bloodflies, and after she took care of Vice Overseer Byrne for him, he's been too smart to waste her talents on shaking down shops. Not when there are other gangs to fight, and criminals to hunt down and punish when they break the order of Paolo’s streets. Jess Foster is the name she answers to. No one questions her covering her face.

Paolo's told her the code for the Jindosh lock, weeks ago.

Meagan isn't cautious, like Emily knows she knows how to be. From what some of the Howlers say when they come running in with the news, the United Miners building, the last place the remaining Overseers holed up as the Howlers pushed them back, is strewn with bodies, doors blasted off. Meagan must have really been something in that past she doesn’t like to talk about. But she'll get herself killed if she's not careful, and by Emily's own allies as likely as not. So, once Emily's traversed the rooftops to track Meagan down and seen her barely escape into a narrow alley, bleeding, from a fight with three Howlers, she reaches out through the Void to the space in front of Meagan, grasps and pulls, and then she's there.

Meagan's got a pistol pointed at Emily's face before she can think, and Emily, almost by instinct, flings out another tendril of the Void back onto the roof, holding it tense through the muscles of her arm, ready to flee.

Then Meagan lowers her pistol. Drops it to the ground, and steps up close to Emily, and places her hand against Emily's shoulder and then her cheek. It's so unexpected that Emily's concentration breaks, leaving her standing in the alley with only her weapons and her hands. Once Meagan's assured herself that Emily is solid, her face takes on an angrier cast than Emily's ever seen on her.

"Outsider's guts, Emily. I should shoot you where you stand."

"Did you come to yell at me?" says Emily, provoked further than she expected. "To tell me to stop slacking and do my work like a good girl?"

"I thought you'd been killed!" Meagan hits her closed first hard against the wall. Her single eye is blazing, the pain shoved down when she talked about getting Sokolov back plain on her face now.

"No," Emily says, somehow not mollified by this. It's not fair, she knows, when Meagan's taken tremendous risks to find her. When she'd be right, if that was what she'd come to say.

"I should have figured you'd be slumming it while everything's falling apart," Meagan continues viciously. "You know, I was enough of a fool to worry about losing you — but you don't give a shit about anyone but yourself. Are you happy? Do you think you'll live out your whole life working for some black magic gang leader?"

What can she say? That she loves this place that's seen better days, not because she imagines it the way it used to be but because she sees the scars it bears and calls it home? Meagan will laugh in her face.

"Do you really want me as Empress?" Emily snaps back. "It wasn't Delilah who let this happen to Batista." Delilah, whose mother died in a debtors' prison, who washed sheets in a brothel. Emily grew up with everything she wanted. _Delilah's the one who wants the throne_, says a nasty little voice in her mind.

Meagan — Meagan who slept hungry on the streets and saw her friends killed, under the best emperor Dunwall's citizens can remember — laughs bitterly. "This'll be your legacy, even more than Batista. Emily who let Delilah run the Empire into the ground." She seems to swallow down whatever else it is that she wants to say. "Kill Luca Abele." 

"What?"

"I'm owed that much. Help me take out the Duke. Then do whatever you want with your life."

Meagan is owed more than Emily can ever give her. Emily nods slowly. "I'll fight with you." She’ll sneak through the shadows, kill or knock out guards with Meagan at her side, and then come back to the shabby little place where she belongs, more than in a palace. To run from her mistakes — or to investigate Stilton Manor, so she can defeat Delilah, whatever happens after. So Meagan won't despise her. Her father's home, she thinks — her home — will still be here. "Come home with me. I've got bandages, ammunition." She offers Meagan one hand, and reaches out with the other to the roofs. Meagan hesitates a moment, then laces her fingers in Emily's, and they take off.


End file.
